‘No, that old gobshite, Swords.’
Poor Bill. ‘He was a bit more complimentary about you,’ I say, smiling.
This surprises her. ‘Was he? I wonder what he’s after? Is it me body, y’think?’ She whoops with laughter, happy to be the butt of her own joke. ‘Aiden Doyle though,’ she adds, salivating comically like the Big Bad Wolf. ‘Now didn’t he grow up to be a pure ride.’
I grin a ‘no comment’.
Walking into Manda’s living quarters is like stepping through the wardrobe to Narnia – a whole different world awaits you. While the B&B’s all chintzy sofas and embroidered curtain drapes, Manda’s private space has been well and truly pimped. Less ‘nursing home’, more ‘footballer’s crib.’ An open-plan space with white leather sofas, black marble flooring and a television the size of a pool table.
The most telling thing though is the 200 or more Christmas cards that cover every shiny surface and every available wall. That’s a few hundred people who didn’t include Manda Moran in a communal Facebook share. They didn’t send her a round-robin email. They got a pen, wrote her name, licked an envelope, found her address, bought a stamp and walked to a post office and that tells me what Swords said was probably true – ‘a great girl, altogether’.
‘Sorry about the state about the place,’ she says, walking in and attacking a non-existent mess, fluffing cushions and moving magazines. ‘I don’t get a frigging second to meself round here. I don’t think half these eejits get the concept of B&B. You know, “Bed” and “Breakfast” – and maybe a light evening meal if you ask me nicely. Do you know what one of them asked me for last night?’ She doesn’t wait for my guess. ‘The wine list and a fecking ice-bucket!’
‘They’ll be asking for spa treatments next.’
She likes this. ‘It wouldn’t fecking surprise me! You’ll have tea o’ course.’
It’s an instruction not a question but I give her the thumbs up anyway.
She shouts over from the kitchen space. ‘So what in the name of God can I tell you about Maryanne Doyle? Terrible business, though, isn’t it. Swords told me she was strangled, is that right? And that she was living in England all this fecking time! A fifty-minute flight away.’ Hands on those considerable hips. ‘So strange that she never came home, hey?’
Very.
I shout back. ‘She hadn’t just lived in England. She’d seen the world, Manda. Sydney, Hong Kong, Cape Town.’
She makes a catty ‘lucky for some’ noise, then catches herself. ‘Ah well, I suppose that’s something.’ There’s a note of regret in her voice. ‘She’d done something with her life, at least.’
I walk over to the kitchen island and watch her for a minute – kettle on, mugs out, milk poured, sugar spooned, without ever looking at her hands once. A sad little choreography.
‘So am I right in thinking you never heard from Maryanne again?’
She goes misty-eyed, the way Gran used to go when she relived the moment she heard Elvis Presley had died.
‘I last saw Maryanne Doyle on Friday May twenty-ninth 1998, sometime in the afternoon,’ she says, peeling the cellophane off a tin of biscuits. ‘And not one fecking peep since. I can still see her now, she was sitting on the wall of St Benny’s, smoking a fag and flashing her bra-strap at some young lad. Pure Maryanne, like. She reckoned she’d gone up to D-cup since Easter. She never stopped going on about it.’
‘And do you remember anything odd about the days or weeks leading up to Maryanne’s disappearance?
She hands me a mug. ‘Not really. Hazel has a better memory for that sort of thing. Are you seeing her?’
I nod. ‘Anything at all, Manda? Anything she said, anyone she’d met, plans she had for the future, that sort of thing.’
A funny little snort. ‘Oh, she’d plenty of plans, all right. Usually America though, never England. I mean, what she thought she was going to do in America, I haven’t a clue, but you’re full of big dreams when you’re that age, aren’t you?’
I gulp my tea, ignore the fact it’s far too milky. ‘So, what was Maryanne’s big pipedream?’
She shrugs me off. ‘Ah sure, I can’t remember, and even if I could, how in God’s name would that help you?’
I put my cards on the table. ‘We’re not sure what Maryanne was doing in England until around 2001, when she turned up in Brighton, and if we understood a bit more about her motivations, her interests, it might give us more of a clue where to start, Manda. It’s a long shot, I know, but we don’t have too many short ones.’
She puts her mug down, gives me a conspiratorial smile. ‘Christ, Cat, you must have really pissed someone off to get this gig. Talk about the short straw! What’d you do? Clatter your boss?’
I smile and feel a surge of affinity for canny Manda Moran. She may have the jolly spinster act down pat, but she’s as shrewd as they come.
And she’s not finished either.
‘Well, look,’ she says, examining her short, neat fingernails, ‘and I’m pure speculating here, but I’d say there’s one very obvious reason why an Irish girl would slip off to England on the hush-hush, and it’s not to chase any big pipedream, you understand what I’m saying?’
Perfectly.
‘You think Maryanne was pregnant and wanted an abortion?’ I hold back the fact that we know she had a child, Manda doesn’t need to know this and it might derail her. ‘What makes you think that?’
She won’t be drawn, gives a little twitch of the shoulder. ‘Pure speculation, like I said. Hazel’s sure of it, though. When are you seeing her, by the way?’
I look at the clock. ‘In about half an hour. Do you still see a lot of each other then?’
She pours more tea. I don’t bother arguing. ‘Ah sure, what’s a lot? I’m run off me feet with this place. She has three nippers under seven and a useless lump of a husband – although a handsome lump, I’ll give him that.’ Melancholy cracks her voice again. ‘Sad though, isn’t it? We used to be the best of pals and here she is, only in the next village, and we’re lucky if we see each other once every three or four months.’
Something suddenly occurs to her and her face lights up. I find myself beaming back even though I don’t know why.
‘Do you know what, feck this,’ she says, switching off the kettle and picking up her car keys. ‘If I drink one more cup of my own fecking tea, I’m going to go loopy. We’ll go down to Ganley’s. I’ll call Hazel and tell her to meet us there. It’ll be gas! They’ve got gorgeous pastries too.’ She picks up the phone, eyes blazing with excitement at the thought of a break in the routine. ‘And Hazel’ll be a lot more help than me, I promise. Nothing got past that one. She’s exactly the same now.’
*
Nothing gets past Hazel O’Keefe apart from her useless lump of a husband’s super-sperm, it seems, and Manda’s face is a picture as Hazel strides into Ganley’s with an obvious round stomach and a ‘don’t-fucking-ask’ expression.
“He got his mojo back, I see,” howls Manda, barely able to breathe from laughing.
The Diner’s now Ganleys, a chi-chi little ‘bistro’ with red and white checked tablecloths and paintings of mournful Pierrot dolls gazing down from every wall at our raspberry mille-feuille.
Hazel plonks herself down, shaking her head at Manda. “Shut-up, you. It’s a fucking disaster. Seriously, he only has to sneeze near me and I’m up the pole again.” She picks up the menu, looks around. “Right, I’ve only got twenty minutes, I’m afraid, as per fucking usual.”
Hazel O’Keefe, nee Joyce, doesn’t have long red hair clamped in a ponytail anymore. She’s got a low-maintenance mum-cut and high-maintenance eyebrows, like she had to make the choice between one or the other and drawing caterpillars on her face seemed like the better option.
She also has a slight edge to her. A spikiness that suggests she’s not mad about being summoned to eat French pastries with law enforcement officers in the middle of the day.